Working Papers in Social Ontology & Subject Formation No. 1 David Kergel: Between Integration and Disruption An Obituary as a Theoretical Framework

This working paper examines the deaths of Jürgen Habermas and Rolf Hepp as marking the loss of two distinct modes of social scientific thought. Habermas is associated with an integrative paradigm focused on understanding, rationality, and discursive connectivity, whereas Hepp is identified with a mode of thought defined by interruption, which resists integration and exposes fissures within symbolic orders. Expanding on the distinction between integration, complicity, and disruption, this paper contends that criticism emerges not primarily from contradictions within existing orders, but from the disruption of implicit forms of participation that stabilize socially accepted norms. Contradiction frequently manifests as an integrated form of criticism, whereas interruption exposes the contingency and constructed character of social order. By referencing key pairings from the history of critical theory (such as Foucault/Baudrillard, Sartre/Derrida, Adorno/Krahl), this tension is reconstructed as a structural element of social scientific knowledge. The argument advanced here is that integration and interruption should not be viewed as opposites, but as a necessary dual movement within critical theory. In the absence of integration, knowledge risks fragmentation; without interruption, it risks becoming ideology. Rather than serving as a final eulogy, this text offers a programmatic call for a social science attuned to power relations and capable of provoking disruption.